30Km Race in Singapore

Well, this is it, folks, this afternoon I'm flying off to Singapore for a 30km race—the Newton 30Km—on Sunday morning. This will be the second time I'm running a 30km race.

The last time I did a 30km race was at Padang Merbok earlier this year, of which I managed a finishing time of about 3:10. I thought that was a decent time, but nothing to shout about. A Singaporean friend of mine told me that the Newton 30km's route is generally flat, so I'm confident of improving on that 3:10. The question is improving by what margin? Well, initially I wanted to make this run a training long run, which means to run it slowly—at any rate, slower than my targeted marathon pace. But then again, you know, I doubt that I can resist the temptation to attempt for a personal best. So I might as well set my mind to try my best to improve by at least 5 minutes!

Although I have done a couple of full marathons and numerous other shorter races, this Sunday will be a historic run for me. For the first time ever, I'll be running in my compression tights! I have tried the tights during a recent 30km long run here in KK, and I felt good in them. I don't really believe that the tights can help in improving one's performance in a race, but maybe it can help to delay the onset of fatigue, I don't know. I'm thinking maybe the only way to find out is to run something longer than 30km, say 35km to really know. Perhaps that experiment running the 30km in KK is not really comparable to the Newton 30km as I did it at a training pace. I did that training run in 3:18, but actually I would have been happier if it was a little slower, say 3:30. I guess I did not have the patience to run slower, and that's something I must improve too. Let's see what happens when I run the marathon pace in Singapore.

Joining me on this run are Khadeeja Shariff and Alvin Wong. Khadeeja is using this race as one of her training long runs in her build up to the Singapore Marathon in December later this year. Whereas Alvin is trying the 30km to experiment whether he's up for a full marathon in the coming Borneo International Marathon 4, scheduled for 01 May 2011.

So it seems that the Newton 30km will be quite an important race for all 3 of us, albeit for different reasons. Wait till I come home on Sunday evening—let's see if I have any good news to report.